Using dd to make harddrive

From: Philip Washington (phwashington_at_attbi.com)
Date: 04/28/04 

Date: 27 Apr 2004 18:21:27 -0700

I was trying to make a copy of a harddrive using dd and I am not
having much success.

The Source disk is smaller than the target.

I first tried
on Computer1
dd if=/dev/hdh | gzip > ComputerDisk.gz
then
on Computer2
gunzip ComputerDisk.gz -c | dd of=/dev/hdh

I wasn't mounted to either disk when I performed these operations.

I wasn't to sure about this method so I tried to use fdisk on the
harddrive in Computer2 and ran

dd if=/dev/hdh1 | gzip > ComputerPart1.gz
dd if=/dev/hdh2 | gzip > ComputerPart2.gz
dd if=/dev/hdh of=MBRofDisk.img bs=512k count=1

I then partitioned the harddisk on Computer2 with exactly the same
size partitions or as close as possible.

gunzip ComputerPart1.gz -c | dd of=/dev/hdh1

I got an error about illegal compression format tried the same with
ComputerPart2.gz and got the same error message.

I have no idea if the MBR image was going to do me any good since
these disk weren't the same size.

Any recommendations on what or how I should do this? I would really
like to learn how to do this using dd. I basically don't really know
what I'm doing, I just tried to read some examples and piece together
an idea of how to go about this.

After running
gunzip ComputerPart1.gz -c | dd of=/dev/hdh1
I also got errors evertime I tried to use a command from /bin /usr/bin
(ls,ssh,dir)
that the share was corrupt. Scared the crap out of me, but I rebooted
and everything was fine.

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